How Focusing on the Customer Experience Drives Business Success

Elizabeth Magill discusses the benefits of making your company’s customer experience (CX) development agile. 

We’re all consumers, and we know from our own behaviour that our expectations are evolving with technology, which is becoming increasingly rapid.

So, it’s not surprising to learn that, according to a Salesforce study, 58% of consumers believe that technology has significantly changed their expectations of how companies should interact with them.

These expectations are high, with 78% expecting to leave a service interaction feeling good about their experience. That is why organisations are using an average of 11 interaction channels to engage with their customers.

The Customer Experience Drives Business Success

Delivering a better customer experience is a key contributor to business success. Forrester took a look across 14 different industries to identify the relationship between a good customer experience (CX) and growth potential.

Depending on the industry, growth was measured either in terms of revenue, total assets under management, or total growth in customers.

Across all industries, improvements in CX showed a positive impact on growth — even in relatively non-competitive industries.

More pointedly, Aberdeen Group found that organisations with a strong omnichannel strategy saw 9.5% YoY revenue growth, versus 3.4% revenue growth for those with a weak omnichannel strategy.

Despite these compelling data points, organisations still fall short. According to the Temkin Group, only 19% of companies rate themselves as delivering a good CX across channels, and only 21% rate themselves as delivering good CX on the phone with self-service.

Feedback from consumers paints an even more dire picture of the quality of CX.

Going Agile

Why is there a gap between the CX companies want to deliver and the CX they are delivering? Well, it’s hard. Managing a rapidly changing technology environment and developing at an accelerating pace is no small feat.

To address this gap, and fuel their success, many organisations are adopting Agile development and automation. In fact, 68% of companies identify agility as one of the most important strategies for success, according to Forbes.

The top benefits of adopting agile include flexibility, speed, and quality:

• Ability to manage changing priorities (88%)
• Delivery speed/time to market (81%)
• Software quality (75%)

With all these benefits, it’s no wonder that the most agile companies in any specific industry are, on average, 2.7 times more successful than their peer group, as specified by Goetz  Partners.

And, when looking at the types of projects on which companies use agile, the customer is king. It’s the projects closest to the customer where companies apply agile, with customer experience, innovation, product management, and sales and service topping the ranks.

Test Automation Turns a Downward Spiral Into a Virtuous Circle!

Automation enables organisations to speed development, and testing is the prime area for automation.

Testing typically takes up a significant portion of development time, often around 35%. Because it’s such a significant proportion of development time, testing often gets short-changed as schedules slip. And with test coverage averaging at best 20%, reducing test time can cause a downward spiral of bad code, resulting in unplanned work, resulting in slipped schedules, resulting in bad code, and so on.

By automating testing, organisations increase test coverage as well as improve quality, which means less unplanned work and more time spent on productive new features. A virtuous circle is born.

For the past 10 years, Cyara has helped organisations automate their CX testing. Check out their infographic for a view of how Cyara Velocity can help drive your CX success.